I love a good celebration. Holidays and parties are all fun, whether it’s the Fourth of July, your birthday, or Talk Like a Pirate Day (this last was September 19, this year).

Well, here is something more to celebrate—you get to read an Archives-related blog post during American Archives month!

The entrance to our State Archives welcomes researchers, and provides an outline of rules for the Orin G. Libby Memorial Reading Room. Rodney, our dinosaur, is getting into American Archives month, but as far as I have seen, no one has asked him any questions.

Every year since 2006, the Society of American Archivists (hey, what do you call a group of archivists?) hosts a month-long, educational celebration for archives around the country. Archives (local, state, and federal all included) can use this month to remind and inform people about what an archives is, what records can be found and stored there, what sort of research can be accessed there, and more. The Society of American Archivists has some great resources available on their Web page. The Council of State Archivists also has some good links, which can be accessed here.

Within American Archives month is another special day of note, this one sponsored by the Council of State Archivists—Electronic Records Day (it was October 10, this year), which is currently in its fourth year. This day is meant to raise awareness about what place electronic records hold in the world. This year, E-Records Day is highlighting the importance of appropriate management of electronic communications in government. Some more great sources are available here on their Web page.

One way that some state archives participate is by sending out informational pamphlets, posters, and bookmarks in honor of this month, or by placing something informational on their website. Typically, this includes featuring something from their own archives (such as this poster from Montana, this bookmark from North Carolina, or this web page in South Dakota), or displaying information on Archives policies (like this fun poster from Pennsylvania, which you really should check out…learn why our collections should be treated like your Aunt Edna).

So in celebration of all this Archives love, here is a brief display of some items of interest from our own State Archives. These items, mostly scanned photos and documents, display a few moments captured in time. These are preserved through archival practices and thus are saved for our future generations.

Oh, and by the way—I’d call a group of archivists an archives. An archives of archivists.

Photographer Frank Fiske was a native of the Dakotas who photographed many images of people and events around the Standing Rock Agency in and outside of his studio there. Here he has photographed some unidentified Indians who are drumming and singing. (SHSND 1952-00448)

Fannie Dunn Quain, a female doctor from the late 19th century, was the first North Dakotan to enter and graduate from medical school, and would later help to start the first “baby clinic” in the state. In this image, she, along with other prominent North Dakota women, served on the first all-woman jury in North Dakota in July 1923. (SHSND 00091-00243)

This image of a small boy in a tractor comes from a collection consisting of images of family and of a dairy owned by the Gessner family around Penn, North Dakota. (SHSND 11091-00001)

The very large (approximately 153 linear feet) William E. Shemorry Photograph collection consists of images and office files of Shemorry, who reported, wrote for, and photographed for newspapers, snapping images of people and events around the Williston area, such as the First Lutheran Junior Choir pictured above. (SHSND 10958-1-52-8)

This image was taken circa 1958, and shows chairs and the setting at the Custer Memorial Amphitheater in Mandan, with actors of the Custer Drama “Trail West” in the background. (SHSND 00053-00006)

The cover and first page of the original draft of our ND state constitution (SHSND 31372)

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: we get a lot of historical and genealogical research requests, working in the Archives. They range from simple (“Can you make a copy of this page from The Wonder of Williams: The History of Williams County?”) to the complicated (“I was in here once ten years ago and looked through five different collections, where I found a letter from a woman homesteader. I should have made a copy of it then…can you help me find it now?”).

Warning: This post is interactive, with few pictures and lots of color.

Knowing where and how to look, and what your sources and available options are, will help you to get started in any quest. We do have a lot to draw from, as you may recall from my mini tour of the Archives in my first post—newspapers, manuscript collections of all sorts of topics, state records, pictures, film, audio, posters, scrapbooks, etc. So, where do you start?

The answer is…it depends. Not every path works for every type of research. The key is to get as much information as possible, and then start looking wherever you can, in whatever might apply.

Doing research often kind of reminds me of reading a Choose Your Own Adventure Book. When I was younger, these books were kind of a big deal. You start off with a basic story line, typically written with second person narration. Something occurs (something cataclysmic, of course). Then you get a choice. Like:

You’ve fallen into a well. Your dog is nearby. You…

Call his name, in hopes that he will come to you! Turn to page 5.
Ignore him, and decide to try and climb up the rope you notice hanging down. Turn to page 59.

You can always change your mind, and you can always try something else, so every time you read the book, you get something different. Unless, of course, you read all of the endings first so you could avoid the pitfalls for the character ending in horrible death, and then pick your favorite ending, like I always did. Not quite what you were *supposed* to do, but it worked for me!

Let’s try it. Here’s an example, similar to requests we’ve received (but made up for these purposes):

I want to find out what happened to my grandfather’s sister, who came somewhere around North Dakota sometime after 1870 and may have died or left before 1920. Her name was Ida Hanson, but I don’t know what her name was after she got married (if she got married). Her brother’s name was Ole Hanson. He settled in Wisconsin. Can you help me?

Step 1: Gather Information
Proceeding with this request can be tough on many different levels.

1. We do not know how accurate this information is. There is a line that is walked when individuals rely on a family story. This requestor already has admitted they do not know if Ida married. So we do not know how accurate the requestor’s knowledge is.
2. The information requested is for a woman in the territorial and early statehood days. We have some written records from this time period, but not too many. Also, many records of the time mainly documented a male presence, referring to husbands and fathers over wives and daughters.
3. We may not be able to answer this question simply because it is so broad. If we don’t find something like, say, an obituary or biography, we may not have “what happened” in our collections.
4. Any name Hanson is sort of like John or Jane Smith up here. And might be spelled Hansen, instead

So, what do you do?
Option #1
You assume the requestor is unsure and needs to recheck sources. Contact them by going to the green box.
Option #2
You have already checked with the requestor, or assume the requestor is correct in part or all of the information they have. Go to Step 2.

Step 2: Apply Sources
Now that we are assuming the request is possible, we have to start checking. What can we check? Perhaps we can take a look at a cemetery index to see if there is a death date. But we are not sure where she settled, other than (possibly) North Dakota, and our cemetery indices are by county only. And if she married, when she passed away, she would have been buried under her married name, not her maiden name. The state death index we have access to is 1900 on, and not before. We have some marriage records pre-1925, but not all, and they are separated by county, so we’d need to know some idea of location if we check those sources. So maybe we can take a look at a census record. Through sites like Ancestry.com (which we have a free library subscription access to), we can do keyword searches by name and state and hope for the best.

What do you do?

Option #1
You take a look at the census, and find a match! A few thousand, in fact, and not all match the facts you have. You assume that the first unmarried Ida Hanson (within reason) is a good possibility, and check to see if there is a listing in the death index for a woman who died and has a birth date around the same time. Skip to the orange box, you lucky duck!
Option #2
You check marriage record indices in hopes that you will find an Ida Hanson marrying some bloke that looks right. Of course, you can only do this if you have a county of marriage, so if you don’t, start over! If you do, jump to the purple box.
Option #3
You take a look at some of the other indices available online, like the biography index we use through the Institute of Regional Studies on a whim. Go to the yellow box.
Option #4
You bang your head against a wall a few times, and wish one of your coworkers had taken this request instead. Take something for the headache, and go to the green box.

Step 3: The Solution
So, did you make it to the end? Or did you read all the boxes through, to find the answer quickly? Sometimes, it would be nice to have that option—to jump through to the end of a search—but the journey of research is also part of the joy of the resolution. (I think that’s part of the appeal of these books.) You have earned your answers!

Research can be difficult, and can take many different paths, but using as much information as you have and knowing the different, available avenues can make it easier and fun. Are you ready to start on your own adventure?

 

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Recently, a woman came into the State Archives with a very old, very large document. It was folded parchment paper covered in beautiful scrolling letters. She said she bought it years ago at a garage sale somewhere in the state, and she brought it in to see what, if anything, we could tell her about it. Specifically, she wanted to know if we could help decipher the handwriting to tell her what it was and who was involved.

The Archives holds many partially and fully hand-written documents.[i] Since it is our goal to maintain these records and make them accessible, we often have to index and transcribe them. Unfortunately, that old script and handwriting is not easy for our modern eyes to read. In the instance of this old document, the writing was clear (not always true in these records), but it was flourishing and calligraphic, and not spaced in any way like the text you are reading on this screen.

Handwriting may range from scratch marks to grandiose flourishes, but script type is not the only reason these types of records are hard to read. For example, some authors and originators of these records had limited communication and education. The clerks recording these documents (who would have had some formal education) might have been dealing with individuals who didn’t speak English, much less write in it.

This is a selection from a tract book record, showing some of the first purchases of land. Handwriting is not the only issue in these sorts of records; different codes indicated different things, different types of ink are used in the record (difficult to tell here, as this is taken from the microfilmed copy), and often, different handwriting can be seen on the same pages.

Even though the majority of settlers here spoke languages derived from the same Proto-Indo-European language base,[ii] the languages were spoken differently, accented differently, and sometimes were written differently. [iii]). Recording what was heard, trying to determine how it was spelled, and gaining some semblance of accuracy must have been difficult enough.

Some clerks or other individuals ended up using their native tongue in documents, or used a mixture of languages in these documents. However, even some typed items show obvious differences, such as old German script, as seen in this German-published Staats-Anzeiger newspaper from 1907.

Der Staats-Anzeiger was published in different locations in North Dakota at different periods of time. Entirely in German, it used old German typescript. These papers often published local items of interest, such as letters to and from the old country and other parts of the new country from German settlers in the area.

More frequently than not, we in the Archives receive or discover these items when both parties are long gone. By this time, we are also dealing with old records that may have been housed in poor conditions, resulting in the added possibility of deterioration.

So, how do we determine what is on these records?

Everything is a clue. We know some script types are different, and we know when (and in what language) they are more prevalent. We know older and earlier records mean certain things.[iv]

Sometimes we can also figure it out by looking at other handwriting on the pages. For example, if I can determine a few words, I can then match some letters in other words, and perhaps find a few more, until I can eventually understand the gist of what is being said. I then know what the letters of those words should look like, and may be able to determine a few more words. We can draw a very pale comparison to the significance of the Rosetta stone, and how linguists were able to determine a fully different language through the use of words they already knew.[v] And of course, it helps to have images to pair with names, newspapers to check for ongoing events, and even a general idea of the area. It also helps to know who might have been in the area. Catholics might have used Latin in some of their documents. If Scandinavians settled more in one area than another, we might be able to guess (if we don’t know) that an item from that area is written in Norwegian, rather than Ukrainian.

As for that old, fully hand-written document that I mentioned at the beginning; the woman was able to pick out a few words, and we figured out a few more, so we did help her somewhat. We were able to help her determine that it was an indentureship agreement from the east coast.[vi]

Reading old writing can be tough, but it is thrilling to determine one more piece of the puzzle.

This page is taken from the pages of MSS 10369, James Flynn’s papers, 1878-1887. This collection consists of receipts, financial accounts, and correspondence concerning the distribution of grain and supplies and the transfer of cattle by a wagon master of the North Western Express, Stage, and Transportation Company. Again, this is from microfilm, and the copy is already in poor condition. What can you make out?

 

Every month, we receive hundreds of historical and genealogical requests in the State Archives – in fact, more than 6,000 each year. However, only three of us deal with the majority of this inflow. Jim Davis, head of reference staff, started working here when the North Dakota Heritage Center was built in 1981. He was originally hired to unpack collections moved from the Liberty Memorial Building, where the State Historical Society used to be, to the new Archives wing. Luckily for us, he stayed. Greg Wysk has been here for just over 13 years. Greg is really involved with the family history side of research and has presented at quite a few family research workshops on the subject. I am the third and have been here for almost seven years.

Remember this image from my explanation of what an Archives is and holds from my first post? We have long been the official state repository for newspapers, and though the collection is not complete for many of those earlier years, we have most issues from most areas. Older ones are on microfilm.

We all deal with different types of requests. Some are straightforward, but some are not. Some stick with you. I’ve helped a woman create a shadow box with artifacts about her family member’s sporty past; helped a couple find the location of where their relative was buried so they could place a tombstone there; helped a man find his step-siblings through an obituary search; and just recently, helped a researcher who was looking for a divorce record determine that the couple in question never actually divorced.

One of the most memorable requests, however, was one that Jim and I worked on together. The researcher involved was interested in a tragedy that had occurred in New Salem in the early 1950s concerning a man who had shot and killed the chief of police of New Salem. He had tried to get information on the trial, but was told repeatedly that the records were closed. When he came to us at the Archives, we turned to the local newspapers, a public source, and found his answer.

The Chief of Police who was shot is shown in this paper from New Salem.

As it turns out, the man charged with murder had been passing through the area with his wife and kids, looking for work. The kids had bought some pop at a local soda shop. When they were charged a penny’s tax on the pop, they protested and departed; then their father came in to protest as well. As the situation escalated, the chief of police was called. He picked the man up—but then the man turned on him, shot him, hijacked a car, and took his family down toward the border of South Dakota before he was finally caught.

This was big news, and many newspapers in the area reported on the tragedy. In this image, the owner of the café points to bullet holes that were shot through her front window during the incident.

The researcher looking into this case was a family member of the accused party, and he wanted to find out what had happened. Knowing this made me uneasy. What do you do when you discover information that shows someone’s relative to be a murderer? I was still pretty new at the time, but even then, I had seen what people experience when they find out anything about their relations. It can be very emotional working here. I’ve seen people cry with joy at finding a solitary picture, and I’ve seen people walk away in total surprise and even disbelief when they’ve unearthed someone’s checkered past.

However, as Jim reminded me when I expressed this, nobody can change the past. We can only find what our records show us and provide that information.

Luckily, in this case, there was no need for unease. The researcher was elated to learn what we had found and contacted us several times more for follow-ups and additional information.

I was talking to a woman recently about her own request, and when I told her that I finished it, she said, excitedly, “What a great job. You help people find their past. You help people find themselves.”

Not every research request, historical or genealogical, is easy to deal with, and every one comes in with its own set of challenges and constraints—but then again, every bit whops an impact.

I recently attended an amazing summit on archiving audio and video history collections. The speaker, Doug Boyd (you can follow him on Twitter, if you’d like), runs the Louie B. Nunn Center at the University of Kentucky.ⁱ

I, along with the rest of the attendees, listened with rapt attention as Boyd discussed the widespread implications of keeping and using these collections. Some of it was very technical, and some of it very poetic, in a way. As the time went on, his talk and discussion afterward helped me realize the depth of something I already believed: audio and video collections are a different breed of history.

Of course, objects and documents can be studied for information. (Danielle Stuckle, Outreach Coordinator, discussed how these historical items can be disseminated into information in her first blog post here). However, audio and video collections are best consumed in the form they are given to grant us the full impact of their importance and meaning.

For example—if you see an old cassette tape, you can examine it as an object…but it won’t tell you what is on it. *If* there is an accompanying transcript—and let’s just say that it is actually typed without error or sounds cut out, which is not always the case—you can glean different information from that. But if you listen to that old cassette, you will learn so much more. You can hear the accents of the people talking; you can consider the way questions are asked; if you hear noise in the background, you can think about what is going on if the interviewer is distracted; and you can intuit more meaning, even in where the speaker is hesitant, and where he or she is fast to answer.

Here is another example. This screenshot shows a partial transcript of an interview that I conducted with ND Vietnam veteran Paul Good Iron.ⁱⁱ

Now, here is the audio.

“Um” can take on more meaning when you hear it than when you read it. Even knowing that a speaker said it at all can change the impact of the story. The spoken word doesn’t really make for clean reading after all.

The challenge with these collections is that it is often easier and faster for researchers to read through a transcript than it is to listen to the audio. Once we have a transcript, it is easily digitized, and can be sent around the world—and researchers using it can search the text by word or read through it at their leisure. That is one of our goals, after all, as you avid readers may recall from my first blog post.

However, I invite you to consider these facts:

• Transcripts can be expensive. It takes a bit of money and a lot of time to get interviews transcribed, and that is not always possible—especially as collections grow.
• Transcripts are not always completely accurate. Have you ever read a transcript and noticed a name misspelled, a word changed, or some other error? Heck, have you ever tried to transcribe something spoken in a thick accent? Possibly where the interviewee lapses into a language that is familiar to them, but foreign to you? Yeah.
• Transcripts are often “cleaned up.” People don’t like to publish all of those uhs and ums and random swearing that may occur. Like it or not, there can be a loss of some authenticity.
• 

  SHSND 0003-184: Mrs. Ted (Ellen Roberts) Pope, pumping water in Slope County.

  Audio and video collections are often a primary source, and transcripts are a secondary source. Let me describe this picture for you. There is a woman with her back turned to the camera, pumping water from a well. She is looking over her shoulder. She is wearing a long dress. The vast prairie stretches out in front of her. It’s very windy. Do you want to take my words as a primary source? What did I miss? Granted, having some information on the photo helps, but what feelings can I invoke with words that can’t be seen through the image? That concept holds true with audio and video.
• There is no easy way to get a good transcript. There is no easy software you can download, no quick way to drop a file somewhere and pull the audio from it.

Yes, it is nice to have those transcripts. They are very useful. But in the end, would you rather read a biography about your great-grandfather (written by him or not), or would you rather hear his voice, speaking about the hardships he went through in settling the land he later would own?

It’s definitely a point for discussion, and each repository must make its own choices. But hopefully, that primary source of raw video and raw audio will find a prime spot on your shelf.

ⁱ The Louie B. Nunn Center has a phenomenal setup, with multiple ongoing projects, and a small team taking in and processing more audio and video collections in a year than some repositories currently have in their collection. As a point of comparison, we do have several expansive audio and video projects and multiple smaller collections in our Archives.

ⁱⁱ As a side note, transcribing this section (two minutes) took me half an hour. Or maybe it just felt that way.

Not long ago, I listened to a woman describe how she ended up with a school bell in her yard from Sanish, a town that vanished beneath the waters of the Garrison Dam in the 1950s. I listened as a woman described how she and her twin, born prematurely in the 1920s, flourished because of a doctor who put them in a cigar box in the stove to incubate. One man described what it was like to see Earth from space. Another man, in the National Guard, described the feeling of dead weight he would always remember from carrying a fallen comrade in Afghanistan, while yet another man told me about flying helicopters in Vietnam.

Although we do not have one position here designated for doing so, as time allows, I conduct and collect oral histories to be stored in the archives. It’s truly a privilege. These stories, all from people connected to North Dakota in one way or another, are often very personal histories. They are sharing these stories—some good, some bad—with a stranger, and with future generations. At first when I meet with them, they are hesitant, often nervous, and often unsure of what to expect. By the end, we are friends, even family.

This photo, of the Nitschke family in front of a sod house in the Jud area, was donated as part of one of our major oral history collections from the 1970s. This image accompanied the oral interview from Mrs. Sibyl Hall, of Edgeley. (SHSND 0032-LM-15-63)

Everybody’s history, whether they played a big or a small role, has somehow affected someone, some place, some thing around them. We do have interviews with politicians, singers, actors, and writers, among others. However, the bulk of our oral history collections consist of the voices of settlers who built up this state, and the veterans who fought for it. This covers a great expanse o f time and very many formats. We have wax cylinders and records alongside cassettes, videos, reel-to-reels, CDs and DVDs. Some of these interviews were conducted by people like me, who worked for or through the State Historical Society, and some were by people who thought it would be interesting, were doing research for a project or paper, or who were relatives. Basically, anyone can conduct an interview…so here are a few things to keep in mind, if you decide to do one of your own!

Focus
It’s not about you. Your interviewee is the focus of your recording, and should be the primary speaker. Give them time to collect their thoughts and encourage them to speak freely and openly. Help them to orient themselves in their memories, but do your best not to color their memories with your own experiences.

Atmosphere
While you can’t control all elements of an interview, you can take precautions. You want to find a quiet place so you don’t pick up the background noises. On the flip side, make sure you’re both still comfortable.

Time
Interviews take some time. You may need to come back, or try again. It’s okay. You don’t want to exhaust yourself or your interviewee, or you won’t be able to collect the data you are hoping for. Plan on some visiting before and after (to set the interviewee at ease, and perhaps explain things).

Equipment
You will want to consider the type of equipment you will use. Remember that two microphones are better than one. If you only have one, place that one nearer to the interviewee. You want to actually be able to hear them.

Another major collection we maintain consists of a variety of formats for different veterans: audio, video, photos, scrapbooks, manuscripts, and biographies. This image is of LeRoy “Nick” Nichols (far left), out of Dickinson; we have 8 mm film and multiple images from his time in the Air Force during WWII. (SHSND 10873-0176-12)

Preparation
You can’t prepare for everything, but you want to try. What do you want to know? You can prep as many questions as you’d like, and may still go off track, but will have a base to return to. How will the interview be used? After it’s complete, where will it go? Do you want to donate it to a historical society? You may need to have the interviewee sign permission or release forms.

Have fun!
Overall, have fun! Interviews are a great way to connect to people, and you are saving their memory for the future. Don’t stress the little stuff; do your best, and the rest will fall into place.

I conducted a quick, unplanned interview with one of our longtime volunteers, Lillian Wilson, who is a war bride from England. She allowed me to tape and post part of our brief conversation. Since it was specifically for this, it is edited slightly for this format and posting, although that is not something I do with my interviews. You can see the equipment I like to use—a standalone mic (which is multidirectional, by the way), and a digital audio recorder. Note that I still place the mic in front of her! Listen to the interview!